Avaya's cautious approach to AI has exposed a fundamental divergence in how CX vendors are positioning themselves in an increasingly automated market. Whilst legacy players like Avaya deliberate on implementation, competitors have split into two distinct camps: those playing offensive moves with aggressive automation and agentic AI capabilities, and those defending market share through incremental improvements. NICE's acquisition of Cognigy represents the offensive strategy—tightening the integration between workforce management, CCaaS, and conversational AI to create a unified automation layer. Talkdesk is pursuing a similar trajectory by reframing the entire category as Customer Experience Automation rather than contact center software. Meanwhile, Salesforce is attempting to weaponise its CRM advantage by combining voice data and AI agents, though the vendor's track record on AI delivery remains a credibility question. Amazon Connect, Zoom, and RingCentral are each carving distinct positions: consumption-based pricing models, simplicity and familiarity, and practical AI for mid-market respectively. The question for teams already running Zendesk or Freshdesk is whether their current vendor is moving fast enough to compete in this new landscape, or whether they risk being left with a platform optimised for the previous generation of CX technology.
The implications for CX leaders are immediate and structural. Governance and compliance have emerged as the decisive factors in vendor selection, not feature parity. As agentic AI systems begin operating autonomously across platforms—rebooking flights, issuing refunds, updating policies—the ability to audit, control, and legally defend those decisions becomes non-negotiable. This shifts the buying criteria away from "does it have AI?" toward "can we trust and control this AI?" For support team leads and administrators, this means the vendors offering transparent pricing, open interoperability, and clear accountability will win. Avaya's customers face an immediate decision: demand explicit AI delivery milestones with contractual protection, or begin evaluating alternatives. The broader risk is that smaller vendors and those without deep integration capabilities will struggle to compete as the market consolidates around platforms that can orchestrate AI agents across multiple systems. The real competitive advantage is no longer the AI itself—it's the governance infrastructure that makes that AI safe to deploy at scale.
Enterprise CX leaders face a difficult question: which AI strategies will deliver measurable customer and operational value, and which are simply buying time? In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher speaks with Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, about how the customer experience AI ma